Planned for the Hills of Malibu, an Unrealized Design Takes On Its Site

Stephen kanner learned while still a teenager one of the most useful lessons in the practice of architecture: the difference between an emotional connection to design and an emotional attachment to a specific instance of design. His father, the late architect Charles G. Kanner, had been commissioned in the 1970s to create a major Northern California retail facility. "It wasn't a romantic building type like a museum, but regional shopping centers at the time represented very desirable work," he says. When the bone of a marsh mouse discovered on-site caused the project to be abandoned for environmental impact reasons, college freshman Stephen, after attending the final hearing on the matter, shared a memorable flight home with his father. "He was obviously pained," Kanner recalls. "Yet his attitude was, you have to let it go, move on. It's always about the bigger picture: You take the principles from one project and apply them to future situations."

Now president of the Santa Monica firm founded by his grandfather, Kanner (who also serves as president of the nascent A D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles) is taking the familial long view on a recent unrealized house. The client is the developer of a high-profile private housing project in Sagaponack, New York: 34 residences by 34 architects, including Kanner, Richard Meier, Zaha Hadid and Michael Graves (see Architectural Digest, November 2002). In the midst of that enterprise, he hired Kanner Architects to design a house for the Malibu hills. "It was nice to be asked to do a West Coast version of what we'd done for him in New York," says Kanner. "But he's building all over the world, and Sagaponack is all-consuming. He realized he couldn't give this house the focus it needed in order to go into construction."

The linear house would fit "stealthily—like a snake alongside a boulder."

The Malibu structure, as conceptualized by Kanner and developed by David Ellien of his office, was to make a defining horizontal cut high up in the rugged hillside. Straddling a ravine that runs into a canyon, it would have a southern orientation to the Pacific while incorporating unobstructed vistas of the Santa Monica Mountains from virtually every room. The central idea, according to Ellien, was that instead of vertically stepping the formidable terrain, the thin-profile, linear house would "fit stealthily into its setting—something like a snake stretched alongside a crusty boulder."

Integrated but not diffident, the house is a series of overlapping volumes organized under a flat, Z-shaped roof plane. The spatial volumes are visually tied together by a copper surround that achieves its boldest moment as the sculptured wall of the west elevation. That wall starts at the roof and continues as a folded surface that shifts back at midpoint to form a generous balcony, effectively wrapping the entire structure Mbius strip style. There are three main components of the 7,000-square-foot open plan: two upper-level wings, private (master suite, two bedrooms, a library and a family room) and public (the formal living spaces); and a lower level (guest room, office, gym and game room) that extends to a deep deck and a pool.

"Because the landscape is so powerful, we felt the house shouldn't turn its back on it," Kanner says. Indeed, the indigenous character of the materials was essential to the building's minimal intervention in the setting. The rich shale deposits on the property would have been utilized for retaining walls and for the house's massive podium. The copper cladding was to be recycled and clear-coated to prevent it from acquiring a noncomplementary green patina. As the architect emphasizes, "We wanted the look to be modern, not rustic: a contextual modernism that nonetheless makes a statement when you come upon it." The use of various woods—ipe exterior stairs, teak louvers, mahogany frames for the large floor-to-ceiling glass expanses—advances the theme of materials existing in concert with each other and with the outlying nature.

Since the completion of the design, Malibu's building code has been revised. Under the city's new, lower height restrictions, the house as conceived cannot be built. "That's the business of architecture," Kanner explains. "We're doing a number of projects with hillside conditions, and we've taken a lot of cues from this one. I would have loved to see this building on that site, but you get philosophical about these things—and no good unbuilt design ever remains purely archival."

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